Orange World and Other Stories

MacArthur Fellow Russell, whose string of best-booked titles started with Swamplandia!, returns with nine wickedly fun stories, four published in The New Yorker. Two favorite scenarios: a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl he's excavated from a Florida peat bog, and the spirit of a giant tree accidentally invades a young woman visiting Joshua Tree National Park.

March 11, 2019
The inimitable Russell (Vampires in the Lemon Grove) returns with a story collection that delights in the uncanny, parlaying the deeply fantastical to reflect the basest and most human of our desires. In “The Bad Graft,” an eloping young couple, Angie and Andy, go hiking at Joshua Tree National Park. They’ve arrived during peak pulse event season, when yucca moths swarm and “the Joshua tree sheds a fantastic sum of itself.” This refers to both pollination and a Joshua tree’s so-called Leap, during which Angie becomes the human vessel for the tree’s spirit. In “The Tornado Auction,” Robert Wurman is a former tornado farmer, retired now after decades of raising tornadoes for “weather-assisted demolition.” His spontaneous decision to purchase a young tornado begins to spiral out of control as the tornado grows larger and more destructive, and he is forced to face the ramifications of his choices on his family. And in the title story, a mother desperate to save her child makes a deal with the devil, allowing the devil to breast feed from her in exchange for protection and peace of mind. Each story is impeccably constructed and stunningly imagined, though not all of them land emotionally. Regardless, this is a wonderfully off-kilter collection.

March 15, 2019
Russell's third collection beckons like a will-o'-the-wisp across the bog, with eight crisp stories that will leave longtime fans hungry for more.Since her debut more than a decade ago, Russell (Sleep Donation, 2014, etc.) has exhibited a commitment to turning recognizable worlds on their heads in prose so rich that sentences almost burst at the seams. Her third collection is no exception, and its subjects--forgotten pockets of violent American history, climate-related apocalypse, the trials of motherhood--feel fresh and urgent in her care. Russell takes an expansive view of history, excavating past horrors and imagining the contours of real terror on the horizon. In "The Prospectors," two society-savvy gold diggers must fight their way out of a haunted ski lodge without attracting the wrath of long-dead Civilian Conservation Corps men killed by an avalanche on the job. Even within the framework of her ghost story, Russell remains attuned to the performances women mount in order to survive the threat of male violence: "People often mistake laughing girls for foolish creatures," cautions the narrator. "They mistake our merriment for nerves or weakness, or the hysterical looning of desire. Sometimes, it is that. But not tonight." In "The Tornado Auction," a widowed farmer risks it all to return to his calling--rearing tornadoes on the Nebraskan plains--over the protests of his three grown daughters. "I saw, I understood, that in fact I had always been the greatest danger to my family. I was the apex predator," he muses after a terrible accident, exhibiting the guilt and regret of a loving father who nevertheless finds it difficult to change his ways. While the title story, "Orange World," offers a chilling--and insightful--depiction of motherhood as a real-life devil's bargain, it dips a toe in the realm of schlocky and crude horror uncharacteristic of Russell's other work. The result is mixed even though the story retains Russell's hallmark narrative strengths: a narrator who butts up against the edge of her own expectations and a strange, uncanny world that yields a difficult solution to a familiar emotional problem. "Rae admits that she is having some difficulties with nursing....There is no natural moment in the conversation to say, Mother, the devil has me."A momentous feat of storytelling in an already illustrious career.

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Starred review from March 1, 2019
After Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove (2013), one might think that Orange World would have a citrusy element, but instead it's code for all the domestic hazards threatening newborns. Yet household dangers are the least of the fears plaguing Rae during a precarious pregnancy, and late one night her cries for help summon the Devil. He?or, more accurately, it?doesn't want her soul in exchange for saving her baby; instead, it wants to be breastfed. Their grotesque pact is one of an array of shocking pairings in this ingenious, reality-warping, darkly funny, and exquisitely composed story collection rooted in myth and horror. MacArthur Fellow Russell writes with mischievous clarity, wit, and conviction, grounding the most bizarre situations in the ordinary. A young desert traveler is possessed by the furious spirit of a Joshua tree; a teen loves a mummified girl he pulls from a bog. Historical moments seed some tales, including The Prospectors, a sublime Depression-era ghost story about two young women grifters; while others leap ahead, such as The Gondoliers, in which sisters use echolocation to navigate a submerged Miami. Heir to Shirley Jackson and a compatriot of T. C. Boyle, virtuoso Russell, gifted with acute insights, compassion, and a daring, free-diving imagination, explores the bewitching and bewildering dynamic between the voracious appetite of nature and its yawning indifference and humankind's relentless profligacy and obliviousness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)